Kochi, India, 15 December 2014
Welcome Remarks
Mr Ram Narain, DDG (International Relations), Department of Telecommunications
Mr R.K. Arnold, Member, Telecommunication Regulatory Authority of India
Mr Anil Kumar Bhargava, Member (Technology), Telecom Commission, India
Mr Rakesh Garg, Chairman, Telecom Commission & Secretary (Telecom), India
Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues and friends
Namaste, good morning
Welcome to this ninth ‘ITU Symposium on ICTs, the Environment and Climate Change’ in Kochi, the heart of beautiful Kerala, God's own country. It is a great pleasure to be here with you.
I would like to begin by thanking our host and co-organizer, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology of India. This event is part of a series of events being held over two weeks in Kochi and we have very much appreciated the Ministry's support and facilitation.
India’s economy is one of the fastest-growing in the world. Innovation and growth of the country’s ICT industry has been the backbone of India’s successes.
The recently launched Digital India programme is understood to be one of the highest priorities of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration.
The programme’s initiation has been very encouraging to investors, as it is focused on providing a secure environment for the growth of the ICT industry, and the application of ICTs as ‘enabling technologies’ in other industry sectors.
However, ICTs must themselves become more environmentally efficient. Now more than ever, it has become clear that ICTs have a central role to play in decreasing the environmental impact of other industry sectors.
This is well understood today, but it is worth recalling that this was not at all the case in 2007, the year I started as Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau.
Since then I have promoted environment and climate change as one of the highest priorities in the Telecommunication Standardization Sector.
We have worked hard in advocating for ICTs to become part of the solution to climate change, including in the UN climate change conferences, and I am pleased to say that this has been one of ITU’s success stories in recent years.
So since this is the last symposium during my time as Director TSB let me just review how we have progressed. It started with an ITU-T Technology Watch Report published in December 2007 analyzed the role that ICTs play in contributing to climate change as well as their potential to assist other industry sectors in developing long-term solutions for environmental sustainability. Since then, 27 reports have been published which cover both climate change mitigation and adaptation, smart sustainable cities, e-waste management and other topics linked to environmental sustainability using ICTs.
The first ITU “ICT and Climate Change Symposium” was held in Kyoto in 2008. This was followed by the creation of a Focus Group on the subject, the adoption of a Resolution at the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly in Johannesburg in 2008, and then the establishment of the study group on “ICT, Environment and Climate Change” – ITU-T Study Group 5, which is meeting here.
These actions secured a prominent position for ICT and climate change in ITU’s work programme.
Since then we have reviewed all of our existing standards to assess their environmental impact, and now energy saving and minimizing greenhouse gas emissions are key considerations in the development of all new ITU-T standards.
The very first symposium in Kyoto highlighted a major difficulty in quantifying the value of ICTs in reducing greenhouse gas emissions was the lack of a set of internationally recognized methodologies.
The development of such a set of international methodologies quickly took priority in ITU’s standardization work, and I am pleased to report that a new methodology looks set to be agreed by ITU-T Study Group 5 here in Kochi this week. This looks at the environmental impact of ICTs in cities and it will be of great benefit to ITU’s work to assist countries to shape Smart Sustainable Cities.
ITU-T has also developed a series of ‘green ICT standards’ for intelligent transport systems and the smart grid; universal chargers for ICT devices; best practices capable of halving a data centre’s energy consumption; methods to recycle the rare-metal components of ICTs; and guidance on how to reduce the environmental impact of ICTs over their entire lifecycle.
We will hear more about these standards over the course of the day and also during SG5 proceedings.
Alongside this event’s focus on ‘energy efficiency’ and ‘climate monitoring and adaptation’, a session dedicated to ‘damage prevention and safety’ will introduce you to ITU-T standards designed to protect telecommunication equipment and installations from damage and malfunction due to electromagnetic disturbances, such as those from lightning. These standards are key to maintaining a high quality of service, and to ensuring the safety of operations personnel.
Let me also remind you that this symposium will be followed by an ‘ITU Forum on Human Exposure to Electromagnetic Fields in India’, which will cover the range of ITU-T Electromagnetic measurements methodologies to measure EMF radiations as per international/national standards prescribed to ensure the safety of citizens from effects of EMF radiations.
All the innovations to be discussed today are contributing to a grander design, and that is the development of Smart Sustainable Cities.
Over 65 per cent of the world’s population now lives in cities. Today’s rate of urbanization is the highest the world has ever seen, and it shows no signs of slowing.
Cities must become home to inclusive societies that manage resources responsibly. Cities will be judged on how they impact the “triple bottom-line” – their success will be measured on how they improve social, economic and environmental welfare.
The technologies to enable Smart Sustainable Cities are maturing, as are the standardized frameworks to support interoperability in smart cities’ underlying technical systems.
ITU has engaged a multitude of partners in our work on ICTs, the Environment and Climate Change – organizations such as UNFCCC, UNEP, UN-Habitat, UNU, ETSI, Step, GeSI, European Commission and UNIDO.
Over the past 7 years, in collaboration with these partners, ITU has organized a series of Green ICT Applications Challenges, held over 60 raising awareness events in all regions of the world and 4 Green Standards Week, the last one held in September in China dedicated to shaping policies and building understanding of the ICT's pivotal role to drive smart-city operations.
Our Focus Group on Smart Sustainable Cities has brought stakeholders together to consolidate the progress that we have made on this front. And as a result of its work, ITU-T Study Group 5 has agreed to create a new Question on Smart sustainable cities and communities.
And I am proud to say that Smart Sustainable Cities are now within reach-thanks to the many experts using ITU as the platform to build consensus on the technical and regulatory foundations of cleaner, happier, more efficient cities.
We have excellent speaker line-up for today’s symposium, I would like to thank them all and the moderators. As with all of our events, at the end of the day we invite you to identify some actions that ITU, in collaboration with other relevant organizations, could take to improve our work to address the issues raised
.I wish you all a most enjoyable and informative symposium.
Dhanyavaad, thank you.
